Second Language Learning in the Context of MOOCs
Shaoqun Wu
2
, Alannah Fitzgerald
1
and Ian H. Witten
2
1
Department of Education, Concordia University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada
2
Computer Science Department, Waikato University, Hamilton, New Zealand
Keywords: Second Language Learning, Corpus-based Language Learning, English for Academic Purposes, MOOCs,
FLAX, Open Educational Resources.
Abstract: Massive Open Online Courses are becoming popular educational vehicles through which universities reach
out to non-traditional audiences. Many enrolees hail from other countries and cultures, and struggle to cope
with the English language in which these courses are invariably offered. Moreover, most such learners have
a strong desire and motivation to extend their knowledge of academic English, particularly in the specific
area addressed by the course.
Online courses provide a compelling opportunity for domain-specific language learning. They supply a
large corpus of interesting linguistic material relevant to a particular area, including supplementary images
(slides), audio and video. We contend that this corpus can be automatically analysed, enriched, and
transformed into a resource that learners can browse and query in order to extend their ability to understand
the language used, and help them express themselves more fluently and eloquently in that domain.
To illustrate this idea, an existing online corpus-based language learning tool (FLAX) is applied to a
Coursera MOOC entitled Virology 1: How Viruses Work, offered by Columbia University.
1 INTRODUCTION
Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are
becoming popular educational vehicles through
which universities reach out to non-traditional
audiences. They are generally offered by English-
speaking universities in the US and UK, and
proponents often express an explicit desire to reach
out to other countries and cultures. For example,
Coursera aspires to provide a “meaningful learning
experience for the millions of students around the
world who would oCtherwise never have access to
education of this quality” (Ng and Koller, 2013).
Clearly, many MOOC students will encounter a
language barrier during their study. Moreover, they
will be strongly motivated to improve their
knowledge of English for Academic Purposes
(Dudley-Evans and St. John 1988); (Hyland, 2006)
as it is used in the MOOC’s subject domain.
The use of domain-specific corpora is a growing
trend in language teaching and learning (e.g.
Gabrielatos, 2005). Most corpora are based on
particular domains, genres, or collections of certain
types of document from which recurrent phrases and
grammatical patterns can easily be retrieved (Stubbs
and Barth, 2003). Among other aspects of language,
a corpus provides an excellent context in which to
study collocations, a notoriously challenging aspect
of English productive use even for quite advanced
learners (Bishop, 2004); (Nesselhauf, 2003).
We have developed an automated scheme called
“FLAX” that extracts salient
linguistic features from
academic text and presents them in an interface
designed for second-language students who are
learning academic writing (Wu and Witten, 2013).
The design is guided by several common ways of
utilizing corpus technology. An extraction method is
included that identifies typical lexico-grammatical
features of any word or phrase in a corpus.
Collocations and lexical bundles are automatically
extracted; students can explore them by searching
and browsing, and inspect them along with
contextual information. FLAX also presents learners
with common words, and academic
words,
hyperlinked to their usage and collocates in
authentic contexts.
Typical MOOCs constitute a vast corpus of
multimedia information, consisting predominantly of
text but supplemented by images in the form of
slides, audio, audio transcripts, and video; all
(usually) in the English language. This paper argues
354
Wu S., Fitzgerald A. and H. Witten I..
Second Language Learning in the Context of MOOCs.
DOI: 10.5220/0004924703540359
In Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Computer Supported Education (CSEDU-2014), pages 354-359
ISBN: 978-989-758-020-8
Copyright
c
2014 SCITEPRESS (Science and Technology Publications, Lda.)
that the very same corpus, pre-processed
appropriately and presented in a different way,
provides a focused resource that allows second-
language learners to improve their linguistic
knowledge in the domain addressed by the MOOC.
(It is also helpful for native speakers of English.)
This paper uses as an example a Coursera
offering entitled Virology 1: How Viruses Work,
from which we have built a FLAX collection. We
illustrate in the next section how this resource has
been augmented for language learning, and then
review how learners can use it to explore language
usage. Having established a specific context, we
elaborate our position by showing how this approach
might be used to facilitate language learning, and
what organizational and teaching structures would
be suitable to put such a proposal into practice.
2 BUILDING THE COLLECTION
2.1 Selecting and Preparing Materials
Vincent Racaniello of Columbia University created
Virology I from lectures that were popular across a
range of web channels, including iTunesU and
YouTube, before being imported into the Coursera
MOOC. These lectures, along with Racaniello’s
weekly podcast This Week in Virology, his academic
Virology blog, and articles related to his virology
courses, are published under a Creative Commons
Attribution licence.
All these resources were pre-processed before
being built into FLAX collections. The lecture
transcripts underwent simple editing, including
division into subsections, and were reformatted into
manageable
chunks as HTML files to decrease
cognitive load when listening and viewing.
Scientific images and their labels from the lecturer’s
PowerPoint slides were
re-formatted for readability.
2.2 Building Digital Library
Collections
The FLAX Virology collection has the four
components listed in Table 1. Textual documents are
searchable, and browsable by title. Videos, audios
and images are embedded within the document.
Table 1: Number of items in the collection.
Podcast audio transcripts 130
YouTube video lecture transcripts 110
Virology blog posts (lectures) 280
Open Access reference articles 40
We use the Greenstone digital library system,
which is widely used open source software that
enables end users to build collections of documents
and metadata and serve them on the Web (Witten et
al., 2010). The linguistic enhancements described
below are all extensions to Greenstone.
3 AUGMENTING TEXT FOR
LANGUAGE LEARNING
FLAX takes text documents, automatically extracts
important language components—such as academic
words and their usage patterns, key concepts,
collocations, and lexical bundles—and presents
them in way that draws the attention of students and
gives them opportunities to encounter these
components in various authentic contexts.
3.1 Words and Usage Patterns
The lexico-grammatical patterns of each word in the
collection (excluding a, an and the) are extracted
and grouped by position in sentence—near the
beginning or in the middle—because these provide
different views of the word’s usage patterns.
For sentence-initial fragments, the part-of-speech
tags of the opening words (except for conjunctions)
plus one word following the query term are used to
generate patterns. For mid-sentence fragments, the
query term’s syntactic type—verb, noun, adverb, or
adjective—is used to select a stretch of text
surrounding the query term, whose tags are used as
patterns.
3.2 Key Concepts and Definitions
FLAX connects to the Wikipedia Miner tool to
extract key concepts and their definitions from
Wikipedia articles. Milne and Witten (2013)
describe the method used to relate words and
phrases in running text to Wikipedia articles. First,
sequences of words in the text that may correspond
with Wikipedia articles are identified using the
names of the articles, as well as their redirects and
every referring anchor text used anywhere in
Wikipedia. Second, situations where
multiple
articles correspond to a single word or phrase are
disambiguated. Third, the most salient linked (and
disambiguated) concepts are selected to include in
the output.
For example, intracellular parasite, cells,
organism, genome, nucleic acid, … in the article
SecondLanguageLearningintheContextofMOOCs
355
Figure 1: Main page of the Virology collection.
titled What is a Virus are identified as Wikipedia
concepts. This definition for genome is extracted:
“In modern molecular biology and genetics, the
genome is the entirety of an organism’s hereditary
information.”
3.3 Collocations and Lexical Bundles
The importance of collocation knowledge in
language learning has been widely recognized. Hill
(1999) observes that students with good ideas often
lose marks in academic essays because they do not
know the four or five most important collocations of
a key word that is central to what they are writing
about. Student text tends to be cumbersome and
error prone because of insufficient collocation
knowledge. The Virology collection contains
massive, high-quality resources that help students
build up collocation knowledge within the area.
We focus on lexical collocations with noun-
based structures verb + noun, noun + noun, adjective
+ noun, and noun + of + noun, because they are the
most salient and important patterns in topic-specific
text. The system first assigns part-of-speech tags to
words in the text and then extracts word
combinations that match syntactic patterns. These
extracted collocations are grouped by pattern and
sorted by frequency.
“Lexical bundles” are multi-word sequences with
distinctive syntactic patterns and discourse functions
that are commonly used in academic prose (Biber
and Barbieri, 2007); (Biber et al., 2003; 2004).
Typical patterns include noun phrase + of,
prepositional phrase + of, it + verb/adjective phrase,
be + noun/adjective phrase, and verb phrase + that.
Such phrases fulfil discourse functions such as
referential expression (framing, quantifying and
place/time/text-deictic), stance indication (epistemic,
directive, ability) and discourse organization (topic
introduction and elaboration).
To help users explore lexical bundles, FLAX
extracts all short phrases that appear in the collection
and sorts them by frequency. We chose four-word
phrases because at any rate, this is the length of
discourse bundle that appears most often in the
literature. Bundles at the beginning of sentences
(“head bundles”) are treated separately from ones in
the middle (“middle bundles”).
4 HOW LEARNERS EXPLORE
LANGUAGE USAGE
FLAX provides learners with simple interfaces to
explore language features extracted from the course
material. Learners can encounter and inspect words
in their original context, or search for them by
simply typing a word of interest, or browse them.
Language activities built from course material
reinforce what they have learnt.
Figure 1 shows the main page of the Virology
collection of blog posts, which in fact correspond to
lectures (this page is the same for the other three
collections). The buttons at the top (Search, Browse,
Activities etc.) link to language features described in
earlier sections.
4.1 Exploring Articles
Users view articles by clicking Browse and selecting
the article’s title. Each article has four different
views. One contains the
original text, and
students can watch or listen to the
accompanying video or audio. The other three draw
students’ attention to the language features described
above.
The wordlist view allows learners to analyze the
range of vocabulary used in the article. It highlights
the most frequent 1000 and 2000 words, taken from
wordlists used in language teaching (West, 1953);
academic words included in the list by Coxhead
CSEDU2014-6thInternationalConferenceonComputerSupportedEducation
356
(1998); and keywords. Clicking a highlighted word
leads to a page that shows all sentences in the
collection containing that word. Keywords
(identified by the TF-IDF heuristic commonly
deployed in information retrieval) are shown in the
keyword view. The user can control the system’s
selectivity by adjusting a slider to reveal more or
less keywords.
The Wikipedia view relates the terminology used
in the article to the Wikipedia, highlighting concepts
that are defined there to helps learners grasp their
meaning. Clicking any highlighted phrase in the
document brings up its definition, hyperlinked to the
Wikipedia article itself; followed by a list of related
topics in Wikipedia that can also be clicked.
The collocation view allows students to examine
lexical compounds that occur in the article, divided
into collocations that involve adjectives, nouns,
prepositions, and verbs. Collocations are highlighted
in the text to help students notice them and study
their context. The system makes it easy for learners
to study collocations in different contexts by
connecting to two external collocation databases that
are built from text in the British National Corpus,
and from Wikipedia articles.
4.2 Search and Browsing
The Search button in Figure 1 displays usage
patterns or collocations of a particular word. For
example, one can study the patterns of the word
sequence, a common academic word in the Virology
collection, under verb + sequence + of and verb +
sequence + that clause; or collocations of the word
virus, the most frequent word. Collocations are
grouped by syntactic pattern, e.g. noun + virus, verb
+ virus and noun + of + virus, and sorted by
frequency. For example, the most frequent noun +
virus or virus + noun collocations are virus
particle(s) and following by influenza virus, rabies
virus, tobacco mosaic virus. Clicking one reveals
how it is used in context.
The LexicalBundles button lists bundles used at
the beginning and in the middle of sentences under
separate tabs. Clicking a
bundle show the contexts in
which it is used. In this collection, the most frequent
bundles are conversational such as And you can see,
And this is a, which indicate the spoken nature of
this collection.
4.3 Language Activities
FLAX provides a series of language activities,
accessed through the Activities button, that focus on
words, collocation, sentence or article structures and
concepts related to the topics. Each activity has a
teacher’s interface and a student interface. In the
former, language teachers and instructional
designers developing MOOC support can select
parameters for exercise creation, and provide hints
for students. The exercises are generated
automatically, and can be reviewed and modified to
discard undesirable language choices before
presenting them to learners.
There are many activity types: here are two.
Cloze (“fill-in-the-blanks”) activities are widely used
to test knowledge of vocabulary and syntax, as well
as reading comprehension. Words are removed from
an article and students must re-insert them. The
target words can be content words such as nouns,
verbs, adjectives and adverbs; or function words
such as prepositions, pronouns, conjunctions and
auxiliaries; or Wikipedia concepts that have been
identified automatically as sketched above. To create
a Cloze activity one selects an article and then
decides whether the system should omit words based
on a specified gap size, or specified parts of speech,
or Wikipedia concepts. Images, audio and video that
accompany an article can be added into the exercise
at the teacher’s discretion.
In a Completing collocations activity, certain
words are again omitted from a document and users
fill in the gaps. Here, however, missing words are
chosen from collocations that have been identified in
the document. FLAX chooses sentences, and
highlights selected collocations. If the paragraph
contains preceding and following sentences, they are
shown as well, to provide context. Many teachers
prefer to focus on certain types of collocation, e.g.
noun+ noun, adjective + noun or verb + noun. This
helps learners focus on sets of words that share
similar meanings but have different usage (e.g.
problem or issue) or word combinations specific to a
topic (e.g. virus infection or influenza virus).
5 DISCUSSION
MOOC participants register for educational courses;
they do not sign up as language learners. Columbia’s
virology MOOC is based on mastery learning
(Bloom, 1984). Course content builds from week to
week, and learners must master previous content
before progressing. Assessments match this
philosophy: weekly quizzes build towards a final
exam.
Of course, the world of MOOCs is fluid: a great
deal of experimentation is taking place in terms of
SecondLanguageLearningintheContextofMOOCs
357
the educational theories and approaches that
underpin the range of courses hosted by different
institutions. Critics of methodology and terminology
divide MOOCs into two camps (Daniel, 2012): ones
based on traditional modes of instruction, typically
hosted by proprietary learning platforms (like our
virology example), and ones based on connectivist
peer-learning approaches, typically built on open
source platforms (Siemens, 2005).
The MOOC language collections we have built
demonstrate the affordances of the FLAX software.
FLAX is open source and can be downloaded to
build language support collections with any text-
based content and supporting audio-visual material,
for both online and classroom use. It is designed so
that non-expert developers—whether language
teachers, subject specialists, or instructional design
and e-learning support teams—can build their own
collections.
Content varies in terms of licensing restrictions,
depending on the publishing strategies adopted by
institutions for their content. FLAX has been
designed to offer a flexible suite of linguistic support
options for enhancing such content across both open
and closed platforms.
6 INTO THE FUTURE
A recent review commissioned by the UK
Department for Business Innovation and Skills
(2013) tracks the progress of the MOOC
phenomenon as it moves from experimentation into
maturity. Current work focuses on meeting the
accreditation needs of learners, and on devising and
developing new pedagogical models to better
support online learning.
FLAX’s capabilities for building language
collections with comprehensive facilities for search
and retrieval, and customized interactive learning of
key domain terms and concepts, addresses the needs
of both native and non-native speakers who are
interested in engaging deeply with specific academic
resources in English while developing their
receptive reading and listening skills.
We plan to investigate further MOOC collections
to determine whether FLAX can assist not only with
mastery approaches to learning and assessment like
those employed in the Virology course, but also with
constructivist approaches that support peer learning
and assessment—where collections will be derived
from student texts, seminar discussions, and peer-
review texts, as well as from expert text and lecture
transcripts. This will promote the aggregation of
crowd-sourced content for collaborative peer
learning.
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